


The Temples of Our Gods

by Trebia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars - The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dark!Rey, Esoteric Force Bullshit, Even you Hux, Everybody Lives, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fix-It, Reylo - Freeform, Star Wars Lore, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, grey!rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:07:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21929455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trebia/pseuds/Trebia
Summary: In the shattered remains of the Death Star on Kef Bir, Rey finds a solution.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 183
Kudos: 680





	1. An Echo

The sound of waves crashing on the wreckage of the second Death Star seem muted this high up in the ruins. Rey focuses her senses with a few shallow breaths. She takes them in through her nose and exhales them through her mouth. 

She is a scavenger built to scale wreckage and root out secrets hidden within the remains of old Imperial ships. This battle station is no different. What distinguishes this scavenging run from others is the fact that she has a direction. 

The Sith dagger might’ve given her a map of where to find the Wayfinder, but it’s the echo of an energy she cannot ignore making her steps so certain. 

It has pulled at her gut since she had wedged the skimmer in a cove made by support pylons impaled into the sea. The call has made her hands know which divots and holds in the metal walls are solid and which ones are not. A few times during her ascent into the heart of the Death Star she has faltered and slipped, but she always keeps her grip and pushes on. 

It is like her own mind has a heading fixed like a point on a nav-system. She can close her eyes and still guide herself up and over the bones of this old beast. 

Her instincts have guided her to this rusted corridor. A few steps further and she’s met with the wreckage of a throne and the drunken tilt of the floor.

It’s here that the call is strongest. A dark, curving signature of energy that winds its way across the scorched panels of durasteel and butts up against a set of blast doors on the far wall. 

Rey treads the panels, seeking out weak spots in the structure for fear of falling through if she doesn't watch where she’s going. 

There’s no interface panel to rig. The doors open for her once she steps in front of them. 

Darkness peers back at her and no light from the outside penetrates the black. Rey hesitates for only a moment before stepping over the threshold and into the anteroom. 

The doors close with a soft hiss behind her and all that she’s left with is the heavy sound of her breathing. She slows it once more. In and out, as her masters had taught her. 

There’s no more sounds of the sea battering the husk of the Death Star in here. Silence permeates the very air around her. It disturbs Rey in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time.

Her eyes focus on a faint point of glowing light. A sickly green, it hovers like nebula dust in the gloom. 

The Wayfinder. Rey closes a hand over it and feels a surge of alien energy rocket up her arm, jolting her. Whispers thread through her mind, sibilant hisses of a language that is long dead. 

The device dims as she peers into its prism of lattice-like crystal.

Something is watching.

Rey cautiously pockets the Wayfinder and stares ahead into the dark. 

This place carries the same weight as the cave on Ahch-To. She can feel the faint tugs at the very edge of her senses, soft touches of the Dark as it reacts to her presence. Rey holds herself very still and lets the sensations wash over her. The palpable presence of the dark side of the Force circles her like a stalking animal, smelling her out for every weakness and fear she has rooted in her mind. 

And the Dark throws it back at her tenfold. 

Rey feels the pressure drop in the air around her. A hiss of energy rushes up her arms and jolts her fingertips in a panicked response. They spark and Rey feels the pit of her stomach drop at the realization that it’s more lightning manifesting.

A pair of hands close over her own, snuffing out the white-blue crackle of Force energy. They’re slim and gloved in dark leatheris. A heat radiates through the thin material and leeches into her cold skin, clammy from the sea water. 

Rey closes her eyes and counts to five.

_There’s nothing here. There’s no one there._

She’s staring at herself when she opens her eyes. 

It’s the same face that greets her in any reflective surface. But it differs from her in its own slight ways—there are sharp, distinctive differences around the set of the mouth and eyes of this thing. This version of her seems more polished, more keen—like the razor’s edge of a vibrosword. 

The entity tilts its hooded head and Rey hears the soft rustle of Lashaa silk. The fabric of its robes shine in the dim light emanating from somewhere in the antechamber, bringing more of the entity’s features into relief. 

“Surprised?” it asks her, smiling. It’s a disarming sort of expression a politician might give and the thought curdles Rey’s stomach.

“Hardly,” Rey grits out, trying to pull her hands away.

“Scared of your own shadow, then,” her dark self croons back, the grip tightening. Rey feels like magnets are holding her feet glued to the spot where she stands as the entity speaks. 

Rey doesn’t argue that point. What is looking at her does scare her. _Confronting fear is the destiny of the Jedi_ , she can hear Master Luke in her mind.

She summons up courage and stares the fear down. The thing’s soft, disarming expression curls into something resembling savage satisfaction. 

It leans in and Rey can feel the whisper-soft brush of its mouth on her ear. “We’re more than our blood, you know. We are more than a name,” it murmurs to her while its fingers tightening over her wrists. 

Rey can feel the blood pumping through her heart as the rush of fight adrenaline surges. She thinks of disentangling herself from it and igniting her saber through its middle. Instead, the entity drops one of her hands and reaches down to draw out the dagger from Rey’s belt. 

She grasps the hilt of her saber, trying to wrench her other arm free before she ignites. 

But the thing closes her trapped hand over the edge of the blade and she can hear the _pat-pat_ of her blood hitting the paneling underfoot. The pain doesn't register. Rey is too swarmed with the rush of images that come to her mind to worry about the long cut that’s opened her palm. Her finger hovers over the ignition switch to her lightsaber. 

Her parents looking at her. The sand underfoot and the sun high on Jakku. Rey’s hand tightens into a fist around the blade of the dagger and it bites further into the meat of her palm.

“This weapon remembers…we are so much more than that, aren’t we? They knew that,” it whispers in her ear.

She sees them clear in her mind and her vision blurs. 

Then they are somewhere else and she is looking at them far removed in the cramped hold of a ship. A memory echoed in the blade itself. 

It remembers sliding through her father’s chest, propelled by the hand of the assassin. Her mother’s cries. Their last gift—protecting her from his reach.

Her shadow releases its grip on her and all she can feel is numb.

Rey’s hand unclenches the dagger and she’s left staring at the smile her flesh makes in her palm, open and wet. The Sith relic falls to the paneling below with a loud clatter of metal on metal. Red stains her skin and more blood trickles over the edge of her hand.

“ _We_ define who we are, not him,” the thing speaks to her. Rey sees it circle her out of the corner of her vision. “They knew we could be more than our name. Our blood.” 

Rey makes a fist to staunch the blood and nearly cries out from the pain. She grits her teeth and fixes her eyes on the shadow as it stops in front of her. 

“Obliterate him,” it tells her, leaning forward with teeth bared. It makes a fist to mirror her own and she can hear the leatheris cracking. “Vengeance. Anger. Let the rage be your fuel.”

“I am not you,” Rey grits out at her darker self.

It grins back and straightens up. “No,” it replies, “not yet. Not ever in this way, even. But a touch of you might be if you take away from here what you need.”

“What do I take from here?”

The shadow doesn’t supply an answer yet. Its dark-shrouded arm extends the folded hilt of a device to her. 

Rey can feel the crystals resonating within. Their energy is as bright and true as the crystal in her master’s old saber where it rests against her hip. 

Her own Core accent sounds clipped and precise as the entity replies to Rey, “Only what you carry with you.”

She clasps her hands over the saber and pulls it back. The hilt she makes a fist around is as solid and real as the scorched paneling beneath her feet. 

“What will this—” she starts to ask. Blast doors hiss open behind her, startling her enough to turn around with a hand on the hilt of her lightsaber. Light rushes into the room.

When Rey looks around, she’s confronted with the space of the room populated with overturned databanks and storage containers. Ordinary. The darker shadow of herself is no more.

The folded hilt in her hand is all too real. 

A cautious voice in her head warns, _it could all be a trap._ A construct of the Emperor’s designed to goad her into a confrontation with him. 

Rey walks over to the listed, ruined steps leading up to her grandfather’s old throne and collapses onto the lowest one. She cradles her hand to her chest and some of the blood smears the white of her tunic. 

She sets the hinged lightsaber hilt on her lap. 

The energy in that chamber, _from it_ , felt like something galaxies away from anything fabricated by the Emperor. There were no inky traces of him like Snoke’s puppet-like Force signature. What she felt was raw and terrible.

And true. Another nexus of the dark.

Heavy footsteps on the paneling interrupt her thoughts. There’s a distinctive swirl of black cloth and the tall, unmistakable figure of Kylo Ren. It’s not a transference of their bond, either. He’s there, stopping to stand and stare at her in confusion when she doesn’t budge from where she’s sitting. Rey is torn between making a quip or lobbing her ignited saber at him in a half-hearted version of their typical 'hello'. 

Rey looks up at the Supreme Leader of the First Order. Blood is still dripping down from her ruined palm and spreading across the wet metal beneath her.

“We need to talk,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to figure out how I'd plug in all this newfound information into my older Dark!Rey fic, Ja'ak, and decided it was time for a clean run at it in the current timeline after watching TROS. 
> 
> If any events described above seem inconsistent in sequence of how the scene went down in the movie (at least leading up to the meeting with her darker self) please excuse! I'm working off of just one viewing of the movie and a synopsis of the scene so it's not blow by blow.
> 
> Like it says on the tin, fix-it fic. I didn't like that ending. So let's make a better one with more space ship action and Ben moments and Rey running Sheev through like the T-1000 from Terminator. 
> 
> -Trebia


	2. Mend

It begins to rain in earnest.

There’s no light dusting of raindrops. This is a steadier downpour from the grey, churning sky overhead.  The air becomes filled with the sounds of millions upon millions of water drops pattering against the husk of the Death Star.

The noise makes it is impossible for Rey to hear Kylo because of the distance between them.

Rey does not move from her seat on the ruined step of the dais. She lets him come closer, relaxing her shoulders and keeping her hands where he can see them. There’s no need to reach for her saber and he needs to know that.

There’s only a moment of hesitancy from him before he moves. He weaves around the wreckage of the old throne room and plants a foot on the same step she’s perched on. His posture is loose and open, hands hanging at his sides but never quite straying far from his saber. The rain is plastering his hair to his scalp and beading across the bridge of his nose.

He’s close enough that Rey has to tip her head back to look at his face, tall as he is. Rain splatters against her cheeks. Rey takes one good look at him and realizes the differences from the first time she saw him.

It feels like millennia since the interrogation room when he first showed her who was beneath the mask . Back then, his face seemed devoid of any real expression. Now when he looks at her, all Rey sees are myriad emotions warring for control. Sadness, frustration, anger, longing. Every feeling that makes his gaze heavy and his mouth twist.

For a stretch of time, all they do is stare at one another. Confusion written all over him. It’s in the hard set of his shoulders and the clenching of his jaw.  She does look quite strange like this, she supposes, sitting in the rain and staring off at nothing while nursing a bleeding hand.

Rey _feels_ strange and wonders when the stone-heavy feeling in her stomach hooked to that strangeness will go away.  There’s been a disconnect between self, the Force, and her whole internal order of things since Kylo’s revelation about her heritage.

She feels unmoored, alone, and out of her depth in this moment.  The darker reflection of herself in the antechamber only pushed her further into a pit of horrible sensations she had no safety line out of.

So now she twists in the wind with what to do next.

A girl who had no name given the worst possible one in the whole kriffing galaxy.

“This must be what you felt,” she says to him, “for years. This…helplessness. I can’t imagine a lifetime of him pulling the strings on your mind.”

There’s a half-beat where Rey swears that his heartbeat jumps in his throat—she can see the thud of his jugular now.

Rey notices his hand still hovers close to his belt, ready to unclip his saber if she makes a move.

She doesn’t budge. Rey keeps looking at him. “The Force bound us for a reason,” There’s a quaver in her voice that underlies the dropping sensation in her stomach. She knows that once it’s out there between them, there’s little to undo her words. “And it wasn’t the light or the dark of it. It was everything. It knew what we could do together. Not divided. This was always how it's supposed to be. Us against him.”

Kylo moves to stand in front of her with his face open and vulnerable.

His look is one of hope and that makes Rey’s heart clench harder. “What are you saying, Rey?” he asks, his voice loud over the sound of rainfall.

Rey  cautiously  sets the hinged saber hilt to the side and out of her lap. She reaches up for him.

“Take my hand,” she tells him.

His chest rises on a sharp inhale as he looks down at her extended hand. His eyes dart from it to her face. He unclenches a fist and pries off the leatheris glove to free up his broad, long hand and place it in her own.

The Bond opens up in a way it’s only ever done with her skin on his—their hands touching on Ahch-To.  Every emotion for him pours out like water over the connection, one vessel to another as her own loop back to him.

A whisper-soft brush of her thumb gliding over the heel of his palm centers her. The unmoored feelings in her find an anchor in him.

She's not alone.

Their synched breathing is loud in her ears, even with the noise of rainfall. She watches him drop to his knees in front of her and knows that he is overcome with this tide of emotions as she is. He’s eye level with her now. His other hand reaches out and pauses  just  inches away from her face, hovering.

Rey is braver. She untangles their hands and takes his face between her own. The wound screams with pain but she ignores it. Blood smears over his jaw from her opened palm.

She presses her brow to his and shuts her eyes. His fingers thread through the hair bound at the nape of her neck, cradling the back of her head. The smokey smell of blaster fire clinging to his damp robes fills her nose.

“How can you feel this?” he asks, the words coming out like an accusation.

She knows he’s left off _'_ _for me'_ from the end of that. He’s trembling and Rey can feel shudders wracking her own body. It’s almost too overwhelming, this oneness. She wonders if it will always feel like this.

“How can I not?” she murmurs, stroking her thumb over the ridge of one of his cheekbones. “I see who you  really  are, Ben Solo. Even at your darkest.”

His hands drop from the back of her head and Rey finds herself held tight and brought up. Her feet leave the ground as he picks her up by the waist in a full-bodied embrace. Her arms go across his big shoulders and twine while his face buries into the soft flesh at her neck. Heat thrums between them and she can feel every rigid muscle brought flush against her. His damp hair brushes against her nose and Rey takes in the clean scent of it. The hold is intimate and their bond only magnifies it.

“I can’t take back all I’ve done. A lot of it, I wish I could,” he bites out and squeezes her tighter.

She can hear his father’s voice in his head. Then Luke's.  Rey feels his shoulders tighten. Tears track out from the corners of her eyes and flood the back of her throat with salt.

“It’s not too late to right some of this,” she says, shaking him by the shoulder and prying herself back. He’s forced to look at her and Rey’s heart clenches at the lost look in his eyes. “It’s never too late, Ben. Leia believes that and so do I.”

“I know,” he says like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Her breath catches in her chest and she squeezes her arms tighter around him.

Rey is unwilling to untangle herself from this embrace. It’s his first real one in years and she can't bring herself to cut off the unbridled relief flooding from him to her.  Addictive and heady, it floods her veins and fills her with a lightness that distracts her from Palpatine looming in their future.

Finally, he  gently  sets her down and his hands linger on her waist. The size of them could circle her midsection and the thought makes her face warm. Her fingers tighten in the folds of his tunic and she feels him tense up.

There’s a long, steady look of heat exchanged between them and their faces drift close.

“Later,” the both of them chorus in unison. She blinks and he mirrors her. Then he cracks the first smile she’s seen on his face and all she can do is respond in kind, laughing with the joy of it. Their hands fall away but they don’t step back out of reach from other.

Ben’s dark eyes look down at the metal beneath them and he reaches up to wipe his jaw free from the blood she’s smeared there by accident  .  The trickle from her hand is spreading on the wet surface beneath their feet, staining the puddles forming in the rain.

He takes her ruined hand and his eyes shut. The other glove gets peeled off so he can cup her opened palm with bare skin pressing at her from all sides. He takes in a deep breath and pushes it out  slowly  through his nose.

Rey feels the cool touch of the Force knitting back sinew and skin and muscle until her palm is as flat and whole as it was before.

She doesn’t have to ask who taught him.  Leia’s technique  is written  all over his slow, meditative breathing and careful gathering of energy on the afflicted area.

Rey wants to cry with the realization. He’s seized some of the light back—enough to heal and mend things that the dark can’t do.

The hold of it isn’t gone from him, though, and might never be. But the same could  be said  for her own darkness and the power that comes from it.

They’re awash in all the Force and its shades.

“We both had a good teacher,” he tells her, tightening his hands around her healed one.

Rey reaches up and cups the side of his face. There’s a plan half-made in her mind already where none existed before. She can do this with him. “We’re going to kill him, Ben,” she says and hopes the conviction in her voice strengthens them both. “He’s going to die for what he’s done to this galaxy—to you. To me. Everyone.”

“And when it’s over?” he asks her, his look expectant on her to give him an answer she doesn’t yet have.

“…we’re going to have to wing it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HE took HER hand. 
> 
> More on the way and the 12 chapters very well might be bumped up to more. This story is going to expand past Palpatine's demise and explore more concepts/settings/feelings I want to explore with these two. I hope y'all are enjoying a lovely break this week and it's been so, so amazing to get messages and reviews of encouragement and a hearty welcome back to writing this pairing. Thank you. You make the whole process a thrill from start to finish.
> 
> -Trebia


	3. A Scoundrel's Son

The rain abates some. They need to get moving—soon the night cycle on Kef Bir will start and leave her and Ben standing in darkness.

_Ben_.

She says the name over and over in her mind like a mantra. Long tucked away and unspoken, she wants to say it a million times to him until he can only think of himself by that name.

Ben Solo, the son of a Jedi and a war hero. Strong in the Force and gifted with the knowledge of generations who are long gone.

Never again the name given to him by the twisted thing she descended from. The one that enslaved his grandfather. She lets that thought resonate over the bond and watches his face tighten into an expression of pain.

Followed in his steps. But even Vader freed himself in the end.

She won’t spare him the truth of how she sees it.

The rain has soaked through her clothes and his hang limp and sodden off his long limbs. They need to get moving. She can feel a burning in her chest take hold—the need to act. The plan is still formulating, but she’s a kriff of a lot clearer on how to approach this now that she has him by her side.

Rey reaches into her pocket and draws out the prismatic shape of the device she sought out in these ruins. She dangles the Wayfinder between her fingertips and holds it up. The spare to the one he possesses. “I was going to find my own way.”

Ben frowns, reaching for the Wayfinder. She lets him take it. He turns it over in his palm. “What changed?” he asks, looking up from the device. His dark gaze pierces through her. He hands her back the device and she slides it back in her pocket for safekeeping.

She has no clear answer for what compelled her to make this stand before him. To extend her hand and offer him a truce. To open the bond and let him feel over every emotion she has when she looks at him.

“A lot of things changed,” she starts, halting. Then, “Myself included.”

She barrels on and doesn't stop to choose her words. “The truth changed who I thought I was. What I’m ready to do to snuff out what's left of that _thing_ ,” she spits out the word. “But I can’t do it alone.” Rey looks up at him through the mist hanging in the air between them.

“I’m with you,” he answers, reaching out to cover her shoulders with his bare hands. His thumbs smooth over the skin and Rey feels her blood rush in response. She cradles his wrists in her hands and Rey glides the unblemished flat of her healed palm up his arm.

“Divided, he might manage to win this,” she murmurs, her hand lifting to cup the side of his face. He leans into the touch like a man starved. “Might kill us both. Together…we stand a chance, Ben. You and I can face him.”

He hesitates. “We could join forces,” he says and Rey can see the wheels turning in his mind. “Mount a joint attack instead. What you’re suggesting is you and me facing this down, Rey. Alone.”

“Which we’re doing,” she insists, tensing up beneath his hands. She didn’t come this far to argue strategy.

“His forces are powerful and the citadel is overflowing with sycophants and Knights. We could cut down one and ten more would replace them. Forget the idea of saving our energy until we reach the emperor.”

Rey purses her lips and tries not to look cross. “I never thought I’d be the more reckless of the two of us.”

He points a finger at her. “Because I’m thinking practical. You could die. We’re using our fleets. The discussion is over.”

“No,” she says in the face of his finality. He turns on his heel, fists clenching as he paces across the rusted floor of the old throne room.

She tags after him, talking to his turned back despite his persistent attempts to ignore her way and press on with _his_ plan. “We’re not involving anyone else but ourselves. Why bother with the tail or middle of the snake when we can both go straight for its head and end this with one blow? He’s weak. I can feel him clinging onto his life force from here if I reach out.”

Ben rounds on her, stalking over to stop Rey in her tracks. His heavy hands fall on her shoulders and he leans in, his tone dark, “The Knights will default to defending him with everything they’ve got.”

“They’ll fall. We’ll succeed. If we choose your plan, we risk killing hundreds of thousands by calling in the fleets. His armada will launch and then we’ll be waging another galactic war for the next decade. He’ll close ranks and we will never be able to get a strike team in to kill him.”

“ _You could die_ ,” he repeats, slower and through his teeth. Strain pulls at his face so Rey reaches up to grasp it between her hands.

“I could, but I’ll try my damndest not to. And so should you,” she murmurs. Ben shuts his eyes and his jaw loses some of its rigidness as she soothes him with words. “How can we die when we’ve got so much living left to do?”

He cups the back of her head and touches his brow to hers, eyes shutting. Rey exhales through her nose and lets the peace she finds in the gesture radiate across the bond to him. He bleeds restless and violent energy, tendrils of it lashing out across the connection to dig into her. She’ll need it soon, but not now. For now, she lets the peace take them both until he stills and calms with her.

“Strike team of two it is then,” he says with a touch of exasperation, straightening up and drawing away from Rey. “But I take point.”

“Deal,” she agrees. The hinged hilt she had set aside earlier flies into her hand at her call.

“Hold on,” she tells him, turning to cast a look at the antechamber off to the side of the throne room. She hasn’t forgotten what she dropped in there.

The blast doors are still open and Rey can see the shape of the Sith dagger lying on the floor. Her blood is still wet on it.

She reaches out with the Force and it propels itself into her grip before she reels her hand back. Whispers slither into her mind as the power radiates off the dark metal. The haft of the dagger is heavy in her hand and Rey throws it with all the strength in her body over the edge of the throne room.

The blade spins into the wind and falls down, down. It hits struts and paneling on the way down to the sea before it winks out of sight, swallowed by the waves. Gone.

A flurry of movement comes out of the corner of her vision. It’s Ben, hurtling something after the assassin’s blade. Rey watches his saber hilt fall into the sea.

Both blades that struck a parent through the heart.

“You might’ve needed that,” Rey tells him after they move from the throne room into the shambles of a corridor.

“It’s a crutch. Something he helped me fashion. I’ll find something else,” he says, staring ahead and walking with a determined, long stride that matches two of her own.

Rey takes the lead on navigating them out of the ruins. Ben points out a lower lying arm of the structure where his TIE rests on a platform. She doesn’t hesitate with the idea that comes to her unbidden. She jogs to catch up with his fast pace and unclips Anakin Skywalker’s saber from her belt.

She slaps it against his chest. He stops mid-stride to look down at what she’s holding against him. Rey grins up at him. “This one suits you more.”

If only she could take a holo of his face in that moment. It’s like he has seen an old friend. His long fingers wrap around the middle of the hilt, turning it over in his grip before clipping it on his belt.

He points out her newfound weapon dangling from her waist, silver metal on black that gleams in the weak light of the fading day cycle. “Where’d that even come from?”

Rey is too busy starting the climb down a rusted ladder to a sublevel to give him a reply that makes sense. She calls up to him, “Don’t ask questions I don’t even know the answer to.”

“Descriptive.” She can hear him rolling his eyes from here. 

Rey ignores Ben and presses onward. The climb down the broken struts and support pylons to the sea is shorter compared to her long climb up. She leads the descent with her careful, meticulous searches for handholds that are secure and not slick with water.

In no time, they’re running at a full sprint across the metal platform to avoid getting swept over by the crashing waves. They slow only once they can hunker down in the shelter of the TIE's folded wing braces. Rey is quick to climb up first, the tails of her tunic flapping in the strong wind.

When she reaches out to offer Ben a hand up, she’s met with the sight of him staring at her with no small amount of amusement.

“We’re a bit pressed for time here,” she strains to make herself heard over the wind.

“Never thought I’d see you climbing into a First Order TIE. I’m admiring the novelty.”

Her face heats up. “Don’t go picking out a uniform for me just yet,” she snaps down at him. Her foot jams back to hit the hatch release with a practiced swing. It pops open and she turns to step down into it.

Ben whistles sharply at her. “Hey. I’m in first.”

“This isn’t a tandem?” she squawks after peering in to find a single-seater. Rey groans.

“No. So unless you’re ready to have me ride in your lap all the way to Exegol…” he shrugs and the barest hint of a smirk plays at the corners of his mouth.

Rey turns to scowl down at him, setting her arms akimbo. “I need circulations in my legs if I’m going to run down a decrepit old Sith. So no, I suppose you do get to pilot.”

“My fighter, my rules,” he gives her a funny half-shrug that reminds her of Han before hoisting himself up the side of the TIE and through the hatch.

Rey imagines all the flight safety rules they’re breaking by having her climb in with no jumpseat to strap into.

She slides in once he gets seated and pulls the hatch after herself. Rey stands between his legs and awkwardly perches on his knee as there's no where else to sit. She helps him with start up on the right side of the cockpit by handling the switches he can’t reach with her blocking. His Wayfinder spins above an interface panel near the ship’s navsystem. It grazes her elbow as she hits the release to start the sublight engines.

His opposite hand does work on the left side console to help bring the TIE online. She regrets helping to vaporize his Interceptor.

That one probably had tandem seats.

His whole thigh makes up a seat, though. She could slide further down and still have ample sitting room, hard and built as his legs are. The entirety of him, really. Rey blinks away the memory of Kylo hunched over shirtless and staring her down.

Kef Bir drops away from them as the TIE lifts off from the makeshift platform. Rey watches the Death Star turn into a pinprick in the hexagonal viewport before the cloud cover swallows their craft. Ben plugs in the coordinates on the navsystem before relaxing back into his seat.

Rey turns to look at him, fingers knotted in the wet folds of her tunic. “How long?”

“Couple of hours,” he replies, watching the viewport as they clear a bank of clouds. Stars start to appear on the horizon as they climb higher and higher into the atmosphere.

Rey turns to watch their ascent. She feels his muscles tense and twist beneath her and hears the sound of clasps being released. A look over her shoulder and she sees Ben pulling the heavy tunic and robes over his head, leaving him in a dark undershirt that covers his chest and arms.

He discards the soaked clothes on the top of a compartment to the side. His hair is a wet mess of tangles. Their eyes lock and both of them freeze.

Rey can’t stop her hand. It reaches to push back his tousled hair out of his eyes. Ben reaches and covers his wrist. He circles the smallness of it with his fingers and feels her pulse thrumming strong beneath the surface of her skin.

His face turns and Rey can’t help the sharp intake of air when his mouth brushes against the thin skin at her wrist. It’s not precisely a kiss—a press of his mouth. He holds it there and breathes in, shutting his eyes. She feels him smiling.

“Is this the later we were talking about?” she asks, searching his expression. The air in the TIE is humid from their breathing and the damp heat radiating off of wet clothes. The cockpit hasn’t fully compressed yet so there’s little in the way of air flow from the vents.

Ben cracks an eye open. “You tell me. Is it later?” He’s baiting her.

Rey leans in and her nose brushes up against the slope of his cheek. His face turns. It’s a clumsy and imperfect press once she slants her mouth up against his. First she registers heat—faint aftertastes of something like cloves and mint. Then his lips move against her, deepening the kiss and cupping the back of her head like she’s something fragile and airy. Loose strands of hair that have escaped her knots tickle her neck as he cards through them.

Some deep, animal sound reverberates in his chest. Rey’s short, staccato breathing answers it.

Her fingers dig into his shoulders as she unfurls under his touch. The exchange scales from something chaste and polite into something violent and heated in milliseconds. A tentative swipe of her tongue cascades into theirs sliding and tangling. She can't get enough of his mouth. 

The whirr of the TIE’s sublight engines is background noise to her. Ben grabs up fistfuls of her ass and turns her whole front to him, sliding her down his legs to set their hips flush. She can feel the outline of his cock pressing into the underside of her thigh. Rey pants against his mouth and twines her arms tighter around his big shoulders.

He’ll see the stain of red creeping down her neck and into the vee of her tunic. She peers into his eyes and sees his pupils have blown wide to make them even darker.

_Should be accelerating into hyperspace soon, shouldn’t we?_

Rey ignores the practical side of her mind and lets the baser half take over. No one has touched her like this. The bond fluxes with the sensations felt by them both, blood running hot and minds racing.

But then Ben catches her wrists and pins them at the small of her back. He bows her back at the waist with the press of his body into her, tips of his hair tickling her face as he hovers.

“If we don’t stop, you’re going to end up bent over that console,” he tells her like it’s a matter-of-fact. There’s a heat in his eyes that makes her stomach flip. He gently releases her wrists once she nods in understanding, scooting back to a respectful distance up his leg.

She wrings out the wet folds of her tunic to distract herself from the heart-pounding arousal making everything between her legs slick. “If you had a stack of cards, we could play pazaak.” Her pitch is high and strained.

“Just keep your hands to yourself and meditate, Scavenger,” he teases her, leaning back into the pilot’s seat with a cockiness he’s yet to show before. Smug, male satisfaction radiates off of him. He interlaces his fingers behind his neck and looks every inch the son of a scoundrel.

Rey wads up his soaked robes and throws them right at his face. It wipes the smirk off of it with a wet smack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously my homage to the amazing body language and transformation of Kylo to Ben we saw in TROS in the last act of the film. Though I wish we had more of it. Something tells me he'd be a dead ringer for many more 'Han-isms' or Han-like acts. Please accept a chapter as a thank you to the continued support and reviews this project is getting. It's a serious joy to plan out the back end and all the bits in-between. Fallout from both sides to follow as the Resistance and First Order get brought up to speed on this new alliance...
> 
> -Trebia


End file.
